GW: DRESSING ROOM A DISAPPOINTED PLACE

25 January 2014

Dave Toyn

Stevenage manager Graham Westley was a disappointed man after watching his side lose 4-0 at home to Premier League Everton this evening in the FA Cup.

He told us, “Our dressing room is a very disappointed place. A lot of the detail of our game was wrong. Mirallas caused us a lot of problems in behind our midfield and we weren’t as front footed with our defending as we’d planned to be.”

After Boro created two great chances to score in the opening minutes, Everton went ahead after just five minutes through Steven Naismith.

“It was an uphill struggle from that moment," GW continued. "Pyschologically you go into these games, you want to keep it tight early on. It’s great if you can go ahead, but you don’t want to concede a soft and silly goal. It was a disappointing goal. Within 60 seconds the nature of the game changed. We could, should probably, have gone ahead. Suddenly we’re 1-0 down and they’re able then to settle in.

"To win these games you need to get a lot right, but we didn’t get enough right to win it. We didn’t get enough right to get into the game, really.

“We had the early chance and started as we wanted to start, we forged the early chance but to win these games you’ve got to take those chances. You’ve got to show clinicality, but we didn’t show the

clinicality and over the 90 minutes you could argue our mentality wasn’t strong enough.

“I think there were phases where we didn’t put our foot on the gas, where we didn’t go for the throat, where we didn’t keep our sense of belief.

"We need to get ourselves back together and go again. We’ll be fine on Tuesday (against Crewe Alexandra)."